When Leander Robinson finally got to see his future wife after a five-week forced separation last December, she didn’t look like the same woman. “She had lost a lot of weight, her skin was much darker, she was very dirty and she was shaking,” recalls Robinson, an electrical supervisor at Stanford Medical Center. “It scared me. I was concerned about her.”
He had traveled to the tiny Pacific island of Marquesas, where his fiancée, Vecepia Towery, was among five remaining contestants in the battle for a $1 million prize on the CBS reality TV show Survivor. The show’s producers had flown in a friend or family member of each contestant and pitted the visitors against each other in a special “reward challenge.” The winner was allowed to remain on the island for one day. Robinson didn’t win, but he got to spend “about 30 minutes” with Towery, an office manager who works in Fremont, Calif.
A few days after Robinson’s visit to the island, taping concluded and Towery returned home as one of two finalists for the Survivor prize. She and Robinson were married on May 5. And on May 17, Robinson watched from the studio audience as Towery was voted the winner during a special episode in New York City.
It was an unlikely ending to an adventure that had begun last fall on a Stanford field near Sand Hill Road, where Robinson filmed Towery’s audition tape. “We figured V’s chances of getting on the show were one in a million,” says Robinson. He almost had it right: the result was a million.
